Urban farming in Amsterdam: Green fingers in the city

From herb gardens to football pitches of pigs, that empty lot on the corner of your neighbourhood could be filled with a lot more than stray rubbish and weeds.

By Molly Quell Dutch News Oct 26, 2016

Excerpt:

One especially hot July day, 13 students from as far as Singapore trampled through a garden in Amsterdam Noord. As it was summer holiday, the university students missed the usual gardeners, a group of nine and 10-year-olds from a nearby primary school.

The students were participating in a month-long graduate course called The Urban Food Experience offered by the University of Amsterdam. As part of the course they were touring Voedseltuin IJplein, one of the many community gardens in the city. In fact Amsterdam has 188 registered city gardens, ranging from small community herb gardens to a football pitch full of pigs.

Allotments The idea of farming small plots of land isn’t new to the Netherlands. The country distributed its first allotment gardens to working-class families in 1838, so people could grow their own vegetables. Over 6,000 such units in Amsterdam are now used primarily for recreation, but there are still a lot of keen veg growers about.

And not all city veg growers are pensioners either. School gardens are a common part of primary school life in Amsterdam. Parents will tell stories of fobbing off baskets of courgettes onto their neighbours because they did not know what to do with them all. The city has 13 official school gardens registered, but many other schools work together with community gardens to give their pupils a sense of the soil.